The Scotsman, who left IndyCar racing after winning the 2007 Indianapolis 500 and Indy Racing League title, won the 35th Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach yesterday in his third race back from his aborted run at NASCAR's Sprint Cup series.

“We exorcised a lot of demons there,” said car owner Chip Ganassi, who returned Franchitti to IndyCar racing late last year after pulling the plug on their NASCAR experiment.

“We both went through a lot of tough times last year,” said Franchitti, who is almost as well known for being actress Ashley Judd's husband as he is for being a champion open-wheel driver.

“I lost my drive, a lot of people lost their jobs. But this felt like the good old days.”

For Franchitti as well as the Long Beach Grand Prix.

After years of being caught in the middle of the Indy Racing League/Champ Car World Series feud (actually pinned in the Champ Car corner), the famed street race recouped some of its former glory over the weekend as a cornerstone of the merged IndyCar Series.

More than 175,000 spectators attended the three-day event with almost 100,000 on the grounds of the 11-turn, 1.98-mile street course yesterday.

No one felt the love more than Castroneves, who finished seventh yesterday some 52 hours after being acquitted by a Miami, Fla., jury of income tax evasion charges.

“Before the race, it was so awesome to see the crowd,” Castroneves said. “There was a lot of emotion, a lot of positive energy. To me, this is my therapy, what I need. I'm back in the game.”

And the 35-year-old Franchitti appears to be ahead of it, despite last year's travails. If anything, Franchitti believes he is better for having walked away from the IRL after winning the 2007 title to make an unsuccessful run at NASCAR.

“By the end of 2007, the reason I went was that I needed to do something else. I needed to take a break. If I stayed, I'm not sure what would have happened. Maybe I wouldn't have won today.”

Only the ever-optimistic Franchitti could draw a positive experience from the disaster that was his NASCAR Sprint Cup career.

He signed with Ganassi's stock car program shortly after winning the 2007 IRL title with Andretti Green, one of several open-wheel champions to jump to stock cars during the open-wheel war.

But he never fully got off the ground in NASCAR. Franchitti broke his ankle in a crash a year ago and missed several races. His best finish was a 22nd at Martinsville and, having started only 10 of 17 races, ranked 41st in points when Ganassi pulled the plug last July 1 for the lack of a major sponsor.

Franchitti drove several more races on NASCAR's second-echelon Nationwide tour before re-signing with Ganassi's IndyCar team.

He returned to open-wheel racing at the end of the end of the 2007 season with a fourth-place finish in Australia and opened this season with a fourth in the series opener on the street circuit in St. Petersburg, Fla.